Food of the Future: Part II: Lettuce Be Inspired

This is how it went each day: Juan, Marcela, and I would clean and prepare our space for class.

To fill the air and up the energy, Juan would play a CD he selected from our combined collection.

I'd make my way to the living room, where I would wait to hear that friendly little beep of the Fundación Niños de los Andes van, full of kids, some of whom got out and waited on the sidewalk for whatever was next.

Little eyes were uncertain.

Where am I?

Who are these people?

What is happening here?

We offered the warmest greetings, and welcomed all inside, to have a little chat at this table.

 Here is where we said,

Welcome! Thank you for coming and participating in The Food of the Future!

Why is it called that? Because you are the future, and whatever you eat will be the food of the future. In a way, the future starts now, because what you do tomorrow will be a result of what you learn today.

Today, we will learn about the life cycle of a lettuce plant, as well as how to sow and transplant lettuce.

We will also make bread!


And create delicious works of art, which we will then photograph!

If there is time (and there is always time) we will paint display art for our table presentation later this month.

We did those things until the van returned, and beeped, at which point we would hug good-bye and they would be on their way.

For us, providing this workshop was an experience full of discovery. Through conversation and finished sentences, we found out which children had experience with plants and making their own food.

Little impulsive hands showed great control when trusted with sharp tools.

Big strong boys were as gentle as little lettuce seedlings needed them to be. All were spoken to with respect, and all took full advantage of the chance to learn and do for themselves. At the end of each day we heard, “When am I coming back?”

We longed to spend more time together, but had to bid farewell each afternoon, and clean our space for the next day.

Five days, twenty five kids, fifty hands and eyes, a million shy smiles and proud greetings over the next few weeks. “Teacher! He doesn’t believe me! Tell him I made bread at your house!”

“Mami! Did you bring more lettuce seeds yet? I have permission to plant them!”

“Look, how much my plant grew in just two weeks!”

It is not some space age nonsense to say that those moments felt like all points in time were happening at once. That, in a way, it feels like people live forever in the people around them.

Choices to harm or help create an impact that far outlasts one human lifespan.

These moments we call past, present, and future flow into each other as a series of causes and effects, from one of us to another.

A familiar peace and elation, seeing the accomplished smile of a child who has surprised himself, is presently as close as I can get to hanging out with a friend who taught me how to grow little food eaters. The light in those young eyes makes me think of Shelly Bowe.

ALS ended her life, but couldn’t touch the beauty of the way she chose to live it.

She grew a community around the basic human need to feed ourselves and each other, co-founded Food Roots and made everyone feel like that kid, discovering new capabilities.

The passion she cultivated will only grow, as she made sure to sow it in the hearts of people around her.

To teach the children from the Fundación Niños de los Andes with my friends, who have also been inspired by Shelly’s work, felt like sneaking out a sly message in a bottle, that we never wrote. We just found it, memorized it, and threw it back into the water, hoping it will float through time to some day when all that’s left of us is information, hopefully well-conveyed. Lessons taught, lived, and maybe even learned.

The Food of The Future: Part I

Don't mind me, 

I'm just browsing photos of historical buildings in Colombia, thinking about the future. 

What comes to mind when you think of "the future"?

Who knows whether we will need to operate ever more minuscule and intuitive technology, or fight the roving hordes who come running when they smell you roasting a radioactive squirrel in a hubcap oven? Or both?  It's the stuff of stories, and really, it's anyone's guess.

Except, I am going to make a wild-eyed prediction about the future. Something I say with all the zealous certainty of a tin foil cap wearing conspiracy theorist, or an old mom who took too many years to realize that dinner is a thing you really do have to make daily: in the future every living human is going to eat or try to eat, maybe even several times, everyday.

I know, kooky, right? But, I am willing to bet on it, which is why I believe in feeding kids well, and equipping them with the values and skills they will need to feed themselves and others as they grow up, because whatever the future looks like will be a result of what they do. And, what they do will be, in part, a result of what they learn now.

Whitney Houston was right!

"I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way."

So was Albert Camus,

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."

The present is where I find myself, currently typing out this blog in Colombia, a country with a sensational food culture which comes from its vibrant history. When I consider what I wish the future of all the little food eaters would hold, I can't help but think of the past.

It seems that, in order to follow the teachings of Mrs. Houston and Mr. Camus, now is the time to strengthen the link between yesterday and tomorrow. For my friends and me, that is the purpose of today.  Well, this month, really.

Meet my friends, Juan Camilo and Marcela. We may just look like three dorks with a Subaru and a selfie stick, but in our minds, we are a gang of food rebels, trying to infuse the food of the future with, perhaps fading, skills from our past.

Thanks to an opportunity granted us by the Fundación Niños de Los Andes, here in Manizales, Colombia, 25 kids will be participating in a comprehensive workshop, where they get their hands dirty, sticky, and covered in paint, all in the name of eating better in the years to come.

Like the legs of a dining room table, this workshop has four principles upon which it stands.

1. Plant dinner: Dinner doesn't really start in the kitchen, or at the store, it starts with the soil.

So that's where we started, with rich soil for seed-starting and transplanting.

It makes sense to want our food to eat well too.

2. Intergenerational Culinary Instruction: that's just my lofty name for kids learning kitchen skills from adults.

Without hands-on familiarity, something like the lettuce we just planted seems pointless, and bread? Well that's just magic. Who can make that? While I would love to spawn a whole generational of crusty little artisans, that is not the goal here.

We want to spark who knows what in all the little brains by showing them that these skills are easy, well within reach, and too valuable to lose. What else might be possible?

3. The Art of Presentation: they say you first enjoy food with your eyes, which is why the best-tasting stuff will be passed over if it looks unappetizing. Not important when you're feeding yourself, but what if you want to enter the food system as a producer?

Aesthetics matters, so all Food of the Future participants are taught basic plating principles and invited to photograph their dish in our Caja de Luz (light box),

to diffuse light and bring all that high res yumminess into crystal clear focus.

4. To Market: later this month, we will complete our lessons with a day at the local farmers market, selling fare produced in our workshop. Participating kids will interact with the wider community, describe their work, and hopefully see some glimpse of the potential they possess while helping man a table for a Saturday.

We have just started, and already enjoyed many rewards from our first couple of classes. As we look forward to the days ahead, planting seeds and skills from the past in this fresh crop of people, we plan, prepare, involve, include, communicate, and share.

So keep watching this space, because who knows what wonders may grow!

Son Shine

The year was 2013, and my son and I were plotting the day's activities.

Me: George is studying space. Let's make a paper model of the solar system.

Henry: Okay, but it better be completely accurate. None of this, "The sun is the same size as Jupiter" business.

Me: Then the sun would have to be the size of a basketball, and the earth will still be minuscule!

Henry: I will not have a false model in this house!

And so, it started innocently enough, like most things around here. Our love for playing with art and science, and making messes, coupled with a zeal for accuracy that can only be described as Really Nerdy, led to us making our own physical representation of the corner of the universe we call The Solar System.

We finished all of the planets on day one, but the sun had to be just so.

It needed to be big, with rays and flares jutting off in every direction. Painting and gluing and painting tufts of tissue paper over every square centimeter of our orbited star, in our insatiable quest for accuracy, plus having lots of other stuff to do all the time, resulted in the sun taking over a year to finish. But finish, we did.

As I took photos of the result, quick and resilient in my determination to find a reason to gloat, I said, “Well, it taking so long is okay. Now it’s to scale in size and time!”

“No, we’d need a few million years more for that.” Henry said, lancing my puffed up falsehood.

“So then, we’re ahead of schedule!” I landed, sunny side up, triumphantly.

But, what were we going to do with all of these paper orbs? Make them all to scale in size, but then just string’em up on a clothes hanger, letting’em bump into each other like our solar system doesn’t do? No.

No.

They would have to be to scale, in spaaaaace. But how? To the mathematician (aka “Dad”)! Who calculated the physical distance we would have to put between the sun and planets, in order to get some of that sweet sweet accuracy we’re always jonesing for.

The numbers were crunched, and the ‘rithmatic ciphered.

Physical Distance Necessary Between Each Planet and the Sun, To Maintain Accurate Scale

Mercury 26’ (as in FEET)

Venus 48’

Earth 67’

Mars 102’

Jupiter 350’

Saturn 641’

Uranus 1288’

Neptune 2022’

It was determined that we would need to take a family trip to the beach. Great.

I mean, I love to go to the beach with my whole family, and have done it many times since then, but managed to bring along the paper solar system exactly zero times in the three years since that realization. The celestial bodies went into a cabinet and we got on with other things. Many other things for a long time.

But three years is but a blip when talking about the vast stretches possible in time.

So is eighteen, if you’re me, today. Yes, those long days and short years of parenthood have culminated in the best possible scenario: the oldest of the youngest BU students is an alum, graduating, flying the nest, taking the world on, and figuring out what is next for him. He’s left home and he’s going to do great.

But first! To the beach! With! The Most Accurate Homemade Solar System Ever!

That’s right.

Gordian Knot? Anyone?

Dang.

There is a lot of space between e v e r y t h i n g .

Here’s where I should say that, no matter how far my son goes, my home is always his home. Because it is. But it’s not. He wants to be on his way and grow up. It made him happy to plan his adventure, and it made us happy to help him make it possible.

Things ending can be sad, but that sadness is overwhelmed with gratitude for having experienced them in the first place. Saying good-bye, good luck, I love you and require frequent updates with photos and video whenever possible wasn’t easy, but we all know he has more learning to do, in the wider world, within and without. He also has five of his biggest admirers back where he came from, beaming in his general direction.

This is a tale as old as time, but it’s the first time it has happened here.

It feels pretty epic, to use a rarely appropriate term. Like countless mothers before and around me, watching their kids grow up and clock milestones, my mind flashes back to the beginning: discovering I was going to be a mother, hearing his heartbeat, choosing his name, meeting him and looking into eyes. Changing, becoming more like the person he needed me to be, more of the time. I marvel at all the years between then and now. To know a person so well, to value him so dearly, has been my model for how to view others.  

He and his parents have taught each other over the years, and now can stand strong in different places, which are actually, relatively close.

After all, when I think about how far the earth is flung out from her sun, it feels like we can never be that far away from each other if we’re on the same planet.

Some March

Imagine pitching this idea to a publisher nowadays: A book for kids, about a girl and a pig and a spider; and life and art and death.

Yeah, no.

Thumbs down

Get out of my office.

Give up writing altogether. Clearly, you have no idea how to make good CGI movies, I mean juvenile fiction.

These are among what I suppose would be the hypothetical responses to first hearing about a story that mostly takes place in a barnyard and hinges on one’s pig’s panicky journey toward accepting how life works. Namely, that it is enriched through creativity and ends for all who experience it.

This isn’t an E-I-E-I-O kind of kids’ farm story. It opens with

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?,’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

An innocent, awakening to death as an order of business, is sentence one. In a kids book.

There’s nothing villainous or evil in E.B. White’s portrayal of the fact that Fern’s father plans to cull the runt of his most recent litter of piglets. John Arable is just starting his day the way many farmers have started many days: humanely ending a young life. He is doing what is necessary to preserve the integrity and efficiency of his home, his legacy, his farm.  

The first chapter of Charlotte’s Web makes you reckon your romantic notions about country life with the reality that there are no freeloaders allowed at the farm. If you won’t fetch a fair price, provide healthy offspring, or make a good Christmas dinner, you will be swiftly removed from the gene pool as soon as you show up.

Yet, something stops him. Fern, doing what many farmers’ daughters have done on many cold spring mornings, empathizes with the piglet under the ax, and pleads with all her heart for his life to be spared. At that moment, John Arable sees and hears Fern differently, knowing that what she is proposing is no way to run a farm.

He decides that her passionate compassion is more important than business as usual. Face to face with true conviction, he recognizes it must be cultivated, unlike apathy which seems to grow like weeds. Rewarding Fern, who “...was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice.” shows that, without fully agreeing with her, he places her right to change things above keeping things the way they are.

Consider this our “Why we marched,” post, because who really cares why we chose to participate in the Women's March, which turned out to be the largest worldwide public demonstration in recorded history?* Isn’t that what the signs are for?

*JKLOL free press, immigrant rights, all kinds of equality, black lives matter, public education, art, science, general civility

Much of the post-march blogtivity has criticized those who participated in that very vocal We Aren't With Him from every thinkable direction. Too idealistic, too safe, too inclusive, not inclusive enough, silly hats, you've probably read it all. As for this blog, why we marched is less important than respecting each other’s right to that very rudimentary expression of values- shouting slogans in the street with a bunch of strangers.

Even, no..especially if you don’t agree with the shouters, consider their noisy presence a vital sign of something so much more important than the farm.